Gates and slots David, Selma, Louise and Elias are a motley foursome of sinners, differing not only in sexual characteristics, but also in the degree of perversion and depravity. These four heroes, sent down from the hellish realms, are destined to decide and fulfill the fate of the world, not allowing numerous monsters to break beyond their infernal dwelling. Their path is not close, their goal is the City of the Dead. Their goal is life, but in its name they will have to kill, dismember, rape, and so on and so forth.
After a creative break that lasted for two years, associated not only with the anorexia of original ideas, but also with the banal lack of financial injections, the master of German gore, delicious meat battles and crimson-blood baths Olaf Ittenbach, the last picture of which was the surreal massacre No Reason released in 2010, in 2012 finally spawned two new and long-awaited films at once (not all, of course, but only hardcore audience, appreciating Deutsch underground). However, it is not worth talking about the special hype around the new creations of Ittenbach, because Olaf never particularly seduced the fate of the festival director even in the narrow framework of horror cinema, although he has his audience for a long time, as well as a recognizable style that has not changed since his debut at the turn of the 80s. Ittenbach is a trend, albeit extremely specific, and one of the brightest names of the German low-budget underground.
His first film from the newly created - "Wild Love" was addressed to the typed modernity and told the standard even for Ittenbach story of the vicious relationship of maniacs, unexpectedly, however, played along with Rob Zombie, and the second - "The Legend of Hell" was neither more nor less, but a kind of application and attempt by Herr Olaf to play on the field of Western European semi-agnostic fantasy and medieval mysteries.
The plot-forming construction of the "Legends of Hell" does not suffer from redundancy; the story told in the film is simple and unpretentious, and Ittenbach does not much try to saturate the picture with ambiguity and polyphonicity, leading the narratives along a direct predictable wave, and revelling in what he succeeds best - with meat, then about other visual effects and completely forgetting, why the tape turns into a very banal quest with an abundance of dismemberment and a small amount of religious humor and black transformation, and persistent in 2011, and out of the world.
Winning “Wild Love” in its plot richness, however, in a new field for the director, the film “The Legend of Hell” was a complete failure, because the desire to escape from the strong clutches of gore turned out to be just a desire, and as a fantasy film does not look and is not even perceived as a self-sufficient and integral work. This is just a very bloody, albeit in some places and visually looking very decent-gothic and obscene-brutal thrash, in which Ittenbach essentially played out in several different angles and discourses the motives of his famous and, perhaps, the best and most spectacular even from the point of view of semantic, and not only meaty content of the film “Beyond the Edge of Time” in 2003, against the background of which “The Legend of Hell” is just a byproduct and substrate, frankly secondary and pretentious film. However, it is impossible to call the “Legend of Hell” a completely incompetent picture, because it is so much to the brain of the bones and tissues of the tendons through Ittenbach’s creation that in its rivers of flesh and blood it is even pleasant to drown in something, choking. And the colorful main characters will remain beyond the edge of time, beyond the edge of evil, just beyond the edge.